This morning, a new report fresh off the presses from e-marketer indicates blistering growth in online video advertising over the next 5 years. Driven by a proliferation of ad networks, demand-side-platforms and scalable, social video production solution-providers, e-marketer sees online video ad spending nearly doubling in only four years from $4.14 billion dollars in 2013 to $8.04 billion by 2016, a 25% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). With the online video advertising industry’s market size and revenue pool set to double over the next five years, the digital video space is also expected to mature to achieve more standardization in video ad format, a larger shift to cost-per-action ad pricing and a rise in native branding on publisher sites.
Meanwhile, TV and digital video advertising revenue pools continue to blur and converge, as multi-platform and multi-screen video advertising is increasingly become an integrated norm. “We’re pretty much approaching all of our major broadcast partnerships in concert with our digital programs,” says David Matathia, director of marketing communications at Hyundai Motor America. “When we’re working with network partners, it’s now rare to see a standalone TV or a standalone digital deal. It’s almost become standard practice to package digital and broadcast together.”
With digital marketers more than ever looking to social video as a key tool to convey rich, sharable brand experiences, e-marketers projections hardly come as a surprise. However, according to e-marketer and Credit Suisse, this growth will be accompanied by stable-to-rising CPMs for marketers (as well as higher RPMs to content creators) on networks like YouTube and mid-tier blog and media placement sites.
US Online Video CPM, by Inventory Tier, 2010-2017
Source: Credit Suisse, e-marketer. Excludes mobile display ad impressions.
Although the report doesn’t touch on social video and branded entertainment advertising, growth in that sub-class is also expected to be strong, driven by the reality that consumers increasingly have (1) more freedom over how, when and where they consume video (and by extension, to skip or ignore ads), (2) more devices to navigate between, (3) more social media activity informing their online identity and (4) less patience for content that isn’t contextually relevant, entertaining and/or informative.
Overall, with marketers, agencies and media companies set to double spending on online video in only a few short years, the future certainly looks bright for standardization, consolidation, innovation and maturity in the digital video advertising space. Let’s hope the quality of the ad content keeps up (or, better yet, improves) with the big expected boost in spending.
Vinny Bruzzese charges up to $20,000 to analyze and make recommendations on Hollywood scripts. He is also catching hate in the comment section of NYTimes.com, mostly from people who didn’t seem to read the entire article about his script evaluation company.
The tone of online commenters seems to suggest they think Mr. Bruzzese is taking the proverbial “room of monkeys writing Shakespeare on typewriters”, and distilling that into script writing software.
Wrong.
With Mr. Bruzzese’s methods, computers write exactly 0% of scripts. His business is highly consultative and contextual while adding years of compiled audience research into consideration. All this to save studios money at the most critical juncture, before it is spent.
Nothing uncreative about that.
Nonetheless, many leading indicators are pointing to the fact that video creative – whether it’s a movie, TV pilot, advertisement or video blog – will be shaped more and more by “big data” in the future. In contrast to Netflix’s shotgun approach, Amazon Studios has begun split-testing new TV pilots by promoting and distributing them freely on the web in order to gather audience reviews and viewer data, while over here at ZoomTilt we’re bring video creators the first self-service software tool to A/B test videos. But, in both cases, rather than using data to take away from the creative magic of screenwriters, directors and filmmakers, the goal is to make production more merit-driven based on true information, not somebody’s opinion or connections.
Welcoming to the new era of data-driven video – we happen to be pretty optimistic about it.
We are proud to show you the first video demonstration of our video testing analytics app! Now you can know exactly what your audience thinks of your videos.
In December, YouTube launched a new redesign which focuses on channels and subscriptions, while tightening its integration with Google+. The reviews from the platforms lovers and marketers have been mixed. It nixed a lot of features that daily users loved but channel managers like the shift towards higher engagement. We’ve listed a few of the major changes and ways to optimize your YouTube channel with them.
Avatar Importance: The image you choose for your channel is now appearing whenever you leave a comment, in the sidebar when your channel is showing, on channel recommendations and more.
Descriptions Can Make or Break It: While channel descriptions can be quite long, only the first 45 characters will show up alongside your avatar and channel title, so make sure its impactful and keyword-optimized.
Make sure to include your keywords in your channel description so that your channel will come up in viewer search results. Be sure they are in your tags as well. Additionally, video descriptions should be inserted before any external website links, as they will increase the likelihood on a viewer clicking on it to watch.
Features Removed: There are noticeable elements that have been removed including “view count”, “relevance” and the “sort by” option.
Links: Make sure to link your Facebook & Twitter accounts to YouTube through account sharing settings and get these to be displayed on your channel sidebar. Additionally, the new design allows you to put multiple links on the sidebar. To optimize this feature include as many links as you want and you can link to a specific section of your website using this.
Learn About the Featured Tab: If you enable the Featured tab on your channel page make sure to use it wisely. Make sure your avatar and playlists correctly represents its. Also, if you have multiple channels, you can display them using Network or Everything template from Edit Channel option.
In short, make sure you get familiar with this new design quickly to make sure you channel is up to date and ready for viewers. For more information, refer to YouTube’s recently published best practices guide.
Video marketing is a content marketing cornerstone, and an integral aspect of brand reach, influence, experience and inbound engagement. Regardless of what your brand identity is, if you aren’t prioritizing video marketing within your content marketing roadmap, then you’re missing one of the best opportunities to draw audiences and customers to an immersive message that is (1) highly sharable in digital and (2) when done correctly, creates high-valence emotional connections. Video marketing can put tiny companies like Dollar Shave Club firmly on the blog roll in a matter of weeks, catapult fledging startups like Ministry of Supply to Kickstarter campaign immortality and event help an established brand like Samsung reinvent itself as the hip, iconic upstart usurping Apple’s smart phone dominance.
Source: Edelman and Adobe.
Overall, there are many benefits to video marketing, including these seven benefits every digital marketer needs to know:
7. Less Investment Needed for Video Marketing Than You Might Think
Did your agency just quote you $200,000 for that social video campaign activation for two quarters from now? Then you’re talking to the wrong solution provider. The reality is technology, information access and competition among creatives has dramatically dropped the cost of procuring high quality, professional video. Moreover, branded video doesn’t need sparkling big-budget studio color-correction to succeed with online audiences. Rather, it needs to resonate with viewers by being hilarious, edgy, inspiring or shocking, and above all, authentic, with characters, visuals and experiences people relate to. As a result, companies like Ford, Ikea, Proctor & Gamble, KMart, Target, AT&T and Fidelity are finding that with just a fraction of their TV ad budget, some savvy storyboarding, social media integration and a thoughtful distribution strategy, digital video marketing significantly outperforms the ROI from traditional TV ad investment.
Which would you rather watch?
Traditional media (sorry eHarmony):
New media:
We thought so too.
6. Precision Targeting
With digital video marketing your brand can reach a targeted consumer audience with relative ease. And by properly taking advantage of social media, distribution channel and keyword targeting, your priority demographic audience can be engaged with near-surgical precision. By combining good content with sufficient seeding to drive an initial, critical mass of viewers to their content microsite, YouTube channel and/or social media hub, brands can hit an earned media home run from social sharing and viral referral. Advocates who like your video are more than empowered to tag, retweet, repost, pin or re-blog it if you make content that is highly sharable.
5. When People Care They Share and Participate
Watching video generates approximately 60% of internet traffic. Other data show that YouTube’s 1 million daily unique visitors watch nearly 3 billion videos per day, with 46% of those viewers taking some sort of action for every TrueView ad they see – typically by clicking the “skip” button. Today’s consumers are highly-connected, easily-distracted internet-informed socialites who recognize when a company is creating value for them rather than just trying to shove a product or message down their throats. This doesn’t mean Millenials can’t be advertised to; but it does mean the way advertising communicates and engages them has fundamentally changed. When 18 to 24 year olds were asked “How do you want to a brand to interact with you?” in a study performed by Global Web Index, over 65% of respondents replied “Entertain me,” a response which occurred higher than “Keep me informed,” “Connect me with people” or “Provide me with interesting experiences.” Moreover, because video is such “leveraged communication” (if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be 100,000+?), the stakes for both success and failure are bigger as well as faster. A truly viral video is elusive – as well as marketing nirvana – but it’s a lot easier to create audience engagement magic and widespread social chatter with a recurring, character-driven video story viewers tune into episode after episode.
Generally, a broad range of recent success stories in branded video entertainment points toward five key themes in winning the battle for video engagement: (1) be authentic, (2) tell a compelling, recurring story, (3) manage content duration and pacing for maximum entertainment payload, (4) give audiences a way to get involved and participate if they want and (5) experiment; try new things. Particularly relevant (and good news) for marketers is the fact that audience’s social sharing of content happens irrespective of the presence or absence of branding and branded messages within the content. Additionally, highly engaged audiences do convert better, in many cases showing 300% higher ad click-through rates on high-quality web TV series compared to average industry pre-roll rates.
4. Humanizing the Brand Experience and Increasing Accessibility
Being more than just a brand is essential to the dialogue you maintain with our customers and social followers. Audiences today want to see the heart, people and characters behind the logo, and video marketing is the one of the best ways to achieve that. When Hubspot rallies its inbound team to perform a cover-rendition of Psy’s viral YouTube opus “Gangnam Style” or Pixability puts its team front and center in entertaining, informational skits on its YouTube channel, it demystifies the brand in an accessible way that enables audiences to enjoy an insider’s perspective.
3. Video Marketing Simultaneously Solidifies Your Inbound and Outbound Marketing Presence
Having a strong, joint outbound and inbound marketing presence is not just smart; in today’s digital marketing landscape it might as well be a necessary. Strong, video marketing allows for this to be achieved with a great deal of ease by generating and proliferating content that simultaneously broadcasts the brand experience and also draws in audiences around conversion destinations.
2. Trial & Error
In the old days of video marketing, brands could simply advertise their product on someone else’s content (for example, TV), because the content brought people’s captive attention to their message. But with traditional TV viewer growth stagnant, time-shifted TV becoming the status quo and 33-50% of TV viewers also consuming additional content on a second-screen device, brands need to embrace new content marketing approaches to bridge the engagement gap. According to the Ruder Finn Intent Index, not surprisingly 82% of people want to be entertained, 96% of people want to be educated, and 92% of people want to be participating in something meaningful. Put that together and it’s not surprising in hindsight that “This is Not Yellow” was a smash success.
But who could have predicted that? The great thing about digital video is that its cost structure and its medium makes experimentation and controlled tests with different content types, experiences and ecosystems a lot easier than, say, experimenting with Super Bowl Commercials. At ZoomTilt, our business centers around testing, piloting, analyzing and distributing a broad range of branded entertainment concepts before we advise our clients to make their media buy and serialize content. That way, video marketers have a lot more certainty around the brand experience they’re creating, the app integration(s) they want to run, as well as the ROI, engagement, reach and earned media outlook for the campaign.
1. Striking Gold: Content that Goes Viral
The holy grail of video marketing is seeing content catch on like wildfire and end up instantly spread all over the web within days. When this happens, a little-known content creator or brand can find themselves transformed into a cultural icon overnight. While it’s impossible to target “virality as a strategy,” gradually building a vested audience with steady, high-quality video content marketing certainly increases the chances that a specific video will catch and ignite. But rather than chasing a single, viral “home run,” steadily hitting singles and doubles – videos that collect tens of thousands of views, consistently broaden awareness of your brand’s message and increase your social reach – can not only supercharge the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts, it can set the stage for when that perfect storm of a video happens to come along:
With the new unveiling of Google+ communities, Google is bolstering community connectivity within its social media platform. While, for most, Google+ remains sparsely populated with active, engaged users, there’s one key reason why filmmakers and video creators (particularly anyone with a vested interest in the YouTube ecosystem) should care about Google+ Communities: The six letters that come before the “plus.” That’s right, Google effectively owns both search and YouTube, so content creators interested in elevated search discovery around their work should definitely consider spending a little more time trying to stir up activity around their content on Google+.
In a small step forward to help members of the currently fragmented creator community network more effectively and bring more search engine optimization (SEO) authority to their content, we’ve created the first Google+ community for web series creators, and we invite everyone to join the community today. Together, we can create a small hive of budding creative activity amidst the larger, less-traveled Google+ landscape.
Starting at 10pm ET / 7pm PT, many YouTube features will be unavailable as the world’s largest video hosting platform undergoes scheduled maintenance.
According to YouTube, multiple site features will be unavailable during maintenance, including:
Commenting and liking
Subscribing
Creating new playlists
Starting a new livestream or Hangout on Air
CMS
Partners with Dropbox access will be able to drop videos in, but they won’t be processed until after maintenance is complete.
As a result, we encourage all creators in the YouTube ecosystem to delay uploading videos this afternoon and evening until the maintenance process is complete and full site functionality and audience engagement features are restored.
Web series aren’t just a guy/gal with a camera, a couch and a vlog talk show anymore, and audiences and advertisers are taking notice. With brands like Ford, Ikea, Target, Yahoo and Intel spending millions annually creating original web entertainment on top of YouTube’s own premium content buys from Hollywood and networks like Machinima, demand for compelling, original entertainment is rising rapidly, and content creators are rising to the occasion.
This week, ZoomTilt debuts three new made-for-web TV comedy pilots: “The Pickup Chicks”, “Spycology”, and “Cool Justice”. Although the three comedies are starkly different shows – with backdrops ranging from Brooklyn bars to a top-secret Spy Academy to a 1970′s L.A. drug bust – they all have several qualities in common: memorable, unique characters, top-quality professional cinematography and studio-caliber story arc development. Following on the tradition established by recent web series standouts like “The Beauty Inside,” Warner Premiere’s “H+: The Digital Series” and “Dating Rules for My Future Self,” ZoomTilt’s first three shows coming out of the TV Reset Project webseries competition demonstrate that creative, compelling storytelling and community-building trumps big budgets in generating earned media and audience engagement.
The first new ZoomTilt pilot is romantic comedy “The Pickup Chicks” by Stacie Capone, which follows a trio of Brooklyn roomates-turned-entrepreneurs dealing with the unexpected success of their dating service for hopeless single guys:
The second show is “Cool Justice” by Todd Rulapaugh and Brian Groh, who play two larger-than-life 1970′s cops transported to modern day Los Angeles to help a beautiful heiress recover her missing inheritance:
The third show is “Spycology” by Tenth Gate Productions, where slacker spy Jack gets jolted by the threat of expulsion from Spy College and the arrival of an enigmatic new female transfer student. Can Jack harness his inner Bond before time runs out on his diploma hopes or his best buddy Tim’s hostage situation?
As both production equipment and video hosting costs continue to drop, knowledge transfer of production and editing expertise is accelerated through lightning fast internet data transfer and digital video demand continues to grow rapidly, traditional TV and “digital TV” will continue to converge and overlap, creating exciting new opportunities and avenues for content creators, advertisers, audiences and digital networks alike.
